Hands-on With the Motorola Devour (Verizon Wireless)

Motorola’s second Android device for Verizon has landed at the Techland offices. Say hello to the Devour. It will be available in Verizon stores for $149.99 after a $100MIR in mid-March. However, Best Buy will begin selling the device this Thursday. Price is currently TBD, but I don’t see it being much different, if it all, from the official Verizon pricing. According to the Best Buy Facebook page, the Devour will retail for $99.

Motorola has gone back to the industrial motif with the Devour, much like they did on the Droid, but I’m not entirely sure that it really works for me. The two-piece aluminum casing is nice, but there’s a lot of empty space, too. Slide the screen out and you’ll find a 4-row keyboard3-row keyboard instead of the standardish 4-row found on most every full QWERTY devices. It’s a breeze to type on but reserve a few minutes to adjust to its layout.

The camera is blazingly fast from start to finish, but there’s no flash. The optical trackpad seems a bit redundant on a touch-screen device, but it comes in handy when going through massive amounts of text. Speaking of which, the screen is rather small considering the overall size of the Devour. Take a look at the area below the screen where the three haptic touch-sensitive icons reside. Seems like a lot of wasted space. Oh, there’s an LED for notifications above the optical trackpad in case you were wondering what that slot was allotted for.

It’s an interesting design. If there’s anything you’d like us to check out over the next week or so, feel free to leave a comment.